When Roe Falls: On the Warnings of Leni Zumas' "Red Clocks"
Leni Zumas | Red Clocks: A Novel | Little, Brown and Company | 2018 | 368 pages
On Thursday, September 2, 2021, the day after the Supreme Court decides to uphold Texas’s near-total abortion ban, an email with the subject line “Just Checking-in with You All” lands in my inbox. The email is from Jennifer, Program Coordinator at a fellowship program I participate in called Patients to Advocates.
Patients to Advocates is exactly what it sounds like—an organization which trains folks who have had abortions to advocate for increased access to abortion. In phase one, we studied stigma busting and other foundational topics relating to reproductive justice. Phase two will cover Policy Education and Engagement, Statehouse Testimonies, Calling Legislators, Media Engagement, and Social Media Safety, among other things.
In the email that the other fellows and I receive from Jennifer, she reminds us to take care of ourselves, pointing us toward the organization’s Employee Assistance Program.
*
One year before, after the death of Justice Ginsburg, I’d spent days writing. I wrote, and I slept (not well) until I completed a moldable essay draft. The essay was published. A more reasonable President was elected. Though President Biden likens himself to a moderate, he joins the fifty-five percent of Americans who believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. He realizes that eighty percent of Americans do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned. The threats facing Roe that Ginsberg’s death seemed to portend were forgotten for a little while, but not forgotten entirely.
*
September 2021 is a break month from my fellowship. I have been looking forward to the break for some time, but find myself adrift. Anyone working in or near the sphere of reproductive healthcare can tell you that the rights granted by Roe are more vulnerable now than they’ve ever been. Some experts even say they expect Roe to be overturned in late 2022. Still, seeing the Supreme Court uphold a six-week ban less than a year after the newest Justice has been appointed—a Justice who took the Constitutional Oath only eight days before a Presidential election—comes as an unpleasant surprise.
During the break I crave the types of discussions that take place at Patients to Advocates’ weekly meetings. I long for the independent work expected of us, the enlightening resources to which we are pointed and asked to read or review. Where can I focus my energy, funnel my rage in this meantime? The more I think about the Texas ban, and each of its plausible implications, the further the end of our month-long break creeps into the distance.
*
Like most other writers I know, I have a shelf full of books I’ve yet to read and a tall stack of checkouts from the library. I stop looking at my phone and start to spend all of my time reading. It helps to live in one or another of my unread books. My rage doesn’t abate, but after a day and a half it slowly starts to fade.
On a Friday afternoon I decide that I need some fresh air. I drive to Mohican State Park. I hike for hours.
After my hike, I stop by the Public Library in nearby Loudonville to browse casually. I don’t go in with the intention of checking anything out, although the library is in the same consortium as the one where I work—my library card is valid here too.
I flit through the fiction aisles and don’t see anything of interest. I am about to turn towards the exit when I see Red Clocks, a novel by Leni Zumas, on the very last shelf. Friends have long been recommending Red Clocks to me, and it has long been sitting on my to-read list.
Standing next to the book, I am unable to walk away. Something about it stands out. It wants to be picked up. It wants to be picked up by me. I pull it from the shelf and a blurb from Kelly Link—one of my favorite short story writers—jumps off the cover. I open the book to the inside front jacket, quickly read the synopsis, and decide that I have to take it home.
*
Once I start Red Clocks, I find that I can’t seem to stop. Whenever I’m not sleeping or working my day job, I’m rapidly turning its pages. Yes, during my break from the P2A fellowship I’ve done nothing but read, but this is different. The way I attack Red Clocks marks the first time in years that I’ve devoured a book with this much focus and intensity. Although several elements of Red Clocks make for a riveting read, I’m not sure I would have read the book with the same degree of urgency at a different point in my life.
In the near-futuristic America imagined by Zumas, a Personhood Amendment grants full rights to every embryo. Though their stories may seem disparate, the book’s four main characters—The Biographer, The Mender, The Daughter, The Wife—are all equally affected by it.
When we meet The Biographer, she is trying to get pregnant on her own, through intrauterine insemination. She’s been on an adoption waitlist for three years. All artificial insemination and single-parent adoption will soon become illegal.
Then the new president moved into the White House.
The Personhood Amendment happened.
One of the ripples in its wake: Public Law 116-72.
On January fifteenth- in less than three months- this law, also known as Every Child Needs Two, takes effect. Its mission: to restore dignity, strength, and prosperity to American families. Unmarried persons will be legally prohibited from adopting children. In addition to valid marriage licenses, all adoptions will require approval through a federally regulated agency, rendering private transactions criminal.
The Mender lives alone near the forest that runs along the outskirts of Newville, a small coastal Oregon town. Her wide-ranging knowledge of common ailments and their natural remedies is well known among the citizens of Newville, some of whom entrust her with their health. The clients who creep quietly to The Mender for care offer goods like fish, batteries, and leftover Chinese food in exchange for her services, until she’s accused of providing an abortion to the wife of a prominent community figure.
Some things are true; some are not.
That Lola fell down the stairs, hard.
That she fell down so hard her brain swelled up.
That she fell down because she drank a “potion.”
That the “potion” she drank before falling down was directly responsible for the falling down.
That the providing of the “potion” counts as medical malpractice.
That the newspaper headline says POTION COMMOTION.
That the oil she gave Lola was for calming her scar.
That the oil was topical, not meant to be swallowed.
That, even if swallowed, elderflower, lemon, lavender, and fenugreek don’t make people fall down.
That nobody will believe forest weirdo over school principal.
A high school student, The Daughter worries about the strength of her application to the Oregon Math Academy, and feels the absence of Yasmine—her childhood best friend who was sent to a detention center—like a phantom limb. But The Daughter’s life takes on dire new shape when she realizes that her period is seven weeks late.
Why do some walruses in Washington, DC, who’ve never met the daughter care what she does with the clump? They don’t seem bothered that baby wolves are shot to death from helicopters. Those babies were already breathing on their own, running and sleeping and eating on their own, whereas the clump is not even a baby yet. Couldn’t survive two seconds outside the daughter.
The ways in which The Wife’s story will be affected by the ripples of the Personhood Amendment aren’t entirely apparent until Red Clocks approaches its end, but her story becomes ominous. The Wife raises two small children and looks after her house as best she can without any help from her husband. The first time Zumas pulls back the curtain on her world, she is putting serious thought into driving her car off of a cliff. Instead, she goes the rest of the way home and anxiously waits for the right time to speak with her husband (again) about the possibility of marriage counseling.
Three months into the timeline of Red Clocks, which is six years after the Personhood Amendment is ratified, the Every Child Needs Two law takes effect. When The Wife eventually decides to leave her absentee husband, she deals with the same internalized stigma that our actual society thrusts upon divorcees with dependents. She also worries about what the future holds for her family. Will other restrictions similar to the Every Child Needs Two law emerge in the wake of the Personhood Amendment?
The questions that the characters in Red Clocks ask themselves are the questions that Americans are asking today. What will happen if Roe v. Wade is overturned? What could happen afterward?
*
The religious right won’t stop with Roe v. Wade. If they succeed in sending the question of abortion legality back to the states they’ll then be able to seek further control. Access to emergency contraception like Plan B and other birth control methods that Americans have used since 1965 could be put in greater jeopardy. There’s already contention over the Plan B pill, and pharmacists and drugstore employees can already decide whether or not they want to sell it.
I’ll never forget how I felt when the only associate (a middle-aged white man) on duty at my local CVS said flatly that it was his right not to sell me Plan B and that he’d have to find one of his coworkers to do it instead. Embarrassment mounted as an impatient, curious line started to form behind me. After five minutes of waiting for someone to return, that embarrassment became tinged with a nauseating fear—what if no one in the store would sell it to me, and the Rite Aid on the other end of town was all out, and the nearby Planned Parenthood, which is only open a couple of days a week, was closed?
I eventually found a Plan B pill—just like I’d been eventually able to find an abortion provider two years prior. I’m not sure what I would’ve had to resort to if Ohio had passed a six-week ban before I became pregnant, or if I’d been unable to find one person in the store who didn’t mind selling Plan B.
In Texas, patients with means are traveling to abortion clinics in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas. One day before Texas’s six-week ban was enacted, a clinic in Albuquerque noticed that a Texan had booked every appointment made online. By the second day after the law was enacted, all of New Mexico’s abortion clinics were booked up for several weeks. Planned Parenthood health centers in Oklahoma have seen a 646% increase in patients from Texas.
Patients within the pages of Red Clocks have an even harder time accessing abortion care than this. For reasons not explained by the main characters, Canada has agreed not to provide abortions to American citizens.
Seekers are transported back in Canadian police cars, or buses–the daughter isn’t sure. When they arrive in their home states, they are charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
Zumas paints a scenario that is chilling but not unlikely. When anti-abortion proponents are able to pass near-total bans, they will try even harder to ensure that each citizen abides by the ban no matter which state they’re in. Then, once only a handful of states can help abortion patients, these opponents will find ways to keep chipping away at access in states where abortion would otherwise continue to be legal.
For example, on October 25, 2021, the City Council of Mason, OH, just outside Cincinnati, voted to criminalize abortion within city limits. Although there aren’t any abortion clinics in Mason, this law still affects citizens of Mason by preventing pharmacies from dispensing the abortion pill and by criminalizing anyone who aids and abets an abortion that takes place within city limits. Meaning any citizen of Mason who lends money for an abortion, shows a pregnant person how to purchase abortion pills online, or donates to an abortion fund will do so at the risk of being charged with a misdemeanor. Similar tactics could be tried in states that are historically known for having fewer barriers to abortion access.
After reading Red Clocks, it's apparent to me that Zumas’ title likely refers to biological clocks. It could also refer to the fact that time might be running out. On rights Americans have come to value for decades. Rights that any citizen of a truly free country should have.